ART 101 – Week 5 February 27, 2010

There’s no week 4 post because I was sick last Friday and didn’t go to class. This week the teacher showed us the movie Fridafor the first half of the class. This was the fairly recent Hollywood biopic about the Mexian artist Frida Kahlo who was married to the somewhat more famous Diego Rivera back in the 1920 – 30’s. I was never a fan of either of their work (or politics – they were both communists) so I wasn’t particularly interested in watching this flick. It was better than I expected though, so there’s that.

Today we started using charcoal instead of the pencils/graphite. I don’t think I have done anything with charcoal in nearly 20 years, so I was looking forward to this. The teacher set up another still life with a couple vases, a bottle and some drapery. We were to just pick one of the objects and draw it with some of the drapery. Here ’tis:

I have to say this was a lot of fun to do. This was also the first time I’ve used this paper for a drawing. If you take a closer look (clicky to embiggen) you can see it’s pretty textured. Hell, this paper would have driven me absolutely bug-shit insane in my younger days, but now I appreciate it for additional interest it adds to an otherwise simple subject. Since the rough tooth doesn’t lend itself well to obsessive detail it forces you to take a more expressive approach. It also makes for faster drawings. 🙂

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I still have the hardest time with making paper texture work *for* me rather than fighting it tooth and nail. I tend to want to do details at the expense of capturing the feeling – just like you said.

On a tangential note… it’s been several times in the last few weeks that I’ve wished that they could put texture on the surface of the Wacom tablet so you had a real-paper feedback to it rather than the marble-on-glass feel. If you ever hear of a solution to that, please shout out.

Sign it! Frame it! Sell it! 😀 It’s signed and I hosed it down with spray fixative.

Yah I guess I’ll stick around a bit longer.

Maturing as an artist means learning to unclench LK. It’s taken me many, many years to finally figure that out. I’ve found that the detail that we crave so much will insert itself in anyways in the form of letting the expressive gesture part of drawing suggesting things to other viewers that they then fill in themselves. That’s why drawings by the really good artists done in a few minutes often look so much better than the studied, detail-obsessed stuff that some student pored hours into, trying to get this or that shaded “just right”.

Wacom tablets – yeah I know what you mean. You could always put a piece of paper on the tablet, but that would probably sacrifice some or all of the sensitivity to pressure I’d guess. Maybe something really thin like tracing paper? The Wacom pens also have some different tips you can use. Have you tried any of those?